Child Labour and Kailash Satyarthi

The desperate conditions affecting the rural as well as the urban poor are forcing children to toil often in subhuman conditions. They are deprived of their basic rights as children including education and their joyful childhood. Most of them have never been to school. Some of them have dropped at a very young age.

Estimates of the number of child labour vary largely. According to 2001 census, 12.6 million children are working in India. But in a Supreme Court case last December, Ashok Agarwal, an advocate of non-governmental organizations submitted that 100 million children are out of school and working- that is half of India’s 200 million children.

India has the largest number of child labour in the world. They are employed in industries and trade, including garments, footwear, brick kilns, hotels, and textile shops. Many children work in export oriented hazardous industries. Girls are often subjected to trafficking.

Kailash Satyarthi

Kailash Satyarthi is an Indian child right and education advocate and an activist against child labour. He founded the Bachpan Bachao Andolan- Save the Childhood in 1980 and has acted to protect the rights of more than 83,000 children from 144 countries. It is largely because of Satyarthi’s work and activism that the International Labour Organizations adopted Convention No. 182 on the worst forms of Child labour, which is now a principal guideline for governments around the world.